


Corrupt

by anstoirm



Series: Fireteam Ward [3]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hallucinations, Mind Manipulation, Mostly Canon Compliant, i take liberties and bungie can fight me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2019-12-07 01:07:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18227864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anstoirm/pseuds/anstoirm
Summary: Are you not tired of the pain? Are you not tired of the loss? Of the fighting?There is a simple solution, oh bearer mine.Come, let us show the world that roses still have thorns.His brother in arms is dead, his Fireteam has dwindled from five to two, phantoms dog his every step and bite at his heels, and all Kel wants is some peace. He finds something that promises to grant him that peace, but doesn't pay attention to its price.





	1. Chapter 1

He should have been there.

It’s a thought that’s plagued him ever since Luke had returned alone from the Dreadnaught, both of the teammates that had gone with him missing. He’d been frantic and shaking, a far cry from the endlessly optimistic and unapologetically cheerful guardian _everyone_ in the tower knew him for.

It had taken time for them to get him to even speak of what had happened, explain why he was alone—Kel had thought that maybe it was simply a case of the team uncovering something that they desperately needed backup on and Gil had taken the risk of being down one team member to send Luke _for_ that backup.

But it was worse.

They’d been overrun. Whether it had been due to the simple fact they were intruding on Oryx’s turf or that Quinn—font of light herself, so different and enigmatic than her fellows, that she was—had been with them and had drawn the attention of the Taken King, they didn’t know. They’d been boxed in, cornered, and swarmed; first by the Hive and then by Oryx’s Taken.

Luke, somewhat lost in what had happened, had speculated that the assumption that Oryx had taken interest in the tower’s resident anomaly was the correct one—the Taken had immediately zeroed in on her once they’d appeared, attempting to cut her off from them.

They’d pushed, and pushed, and pushed, but they’d begun to run low on ammo and strength.

And now Luke was all that was left.

Quinn, ripped through a portal into another plane of existence and presumably lost to them forever. Gil had sacrificed himself to give Luke enough of an opening to flee and seek help or to simply alert the Vanguard of the mission failure and loss.

It was probably the latter, Kel thinks bitterly. Luke’s ghost, Gibson, had solemnly confirmed that Gil’s light signature had been erased entirely. Quinn’s signature was faint but still there—but too far out of reach for them to help her inasmuch as any of them could figure out.

The Ascendant Plane was a vast expanse of void and they could spend an eternity searching for her within it, but without a point of entry and something to home in on her, it would be ultimately fruitless and a waste of resources to try and search for her. Just pulling an Ascendant soul from one of Oryx’s soldiers and hopping into the void after her wasn’t good enough; with how many guardians they had already lost trying to find Oryx’s throne world and failing, I wasn’t a risk they could take.

Even Cayde had admitted it, pain evident in the utter lack of his usual affable attitude as he did so.

And so it was that Kel was down two teammates, the loss stinging far more than anyone around him could understand. None of them knew of the phantoms that plagued him. None of them knew that this was a loss that only added to the number of ghosts haunting his steps.

A memorial is held.

It’s a short affair because even with as well-known and respected as Gil was among his fellow guardians, even with as quickly as Quinn had wormed her way into their hearts—they’re in the middle of a war on four fronts and they don’t have the time or resources to spare.

It’s rare that any lost guardian winds up with a memorial service, but Gil was tantamount to a hero within City walls, having fought at the sides of the Vanguard members hundreds of years past. Defending the walls as they were built and holding off the siege of the Fallen at Six Fronts, saving lives at the battle of Twilight Gap, respected mentor alongside Shaxx to newly risen guardians for many, many years.

He was one of the best guardians the City probably ever had or _will_ have, and as a result a decently large crowd gathers to show their respect.

He was gruff and abrasive, but loved and respected.

Yet still only moments after saying their solemn farewells, Cayde and Ikora are already leaving the plaza discussing the next step in the war against the Taken King. Zavala paces a few steps ahead of them, looking a fair bit more solemn than usual, as they all retreat for the Vanguard hall.

Kel’s fairly certain Cayde is trying to find _some_ way to rescue Quinn on the side of his work, but Kel had heard of Toland the Shattered, and he doesn’t hold out hope.

The loss hurts them all, but the Vanguard has already moved on and before long Kel is the only one left standing in the plaza, for the first time in centuries feeling the prickling sensation of being overwhelmed by the mere presence of others.

None of them have time to mourn. To _truly_ mourn. Humanity has clung to the tails of survival for thousands of years, and mourning the loss of a single guardian was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Not even for Gil, and certainly not for one that had only been a presence for under a decade.

Kel leaves the City.

He vanishes because he’s tired of the condolences from the older guardians that knew him as the hero that always fought at Gil’s side, at his _friend’s_ side, and the apartment the team shared is too quiet with both him and Quinn gone and with Luke as withdrawn as he’s become. 

The silence is driving him _mad_ and it’s a feeling he’s unfamiliar with. Silence had been his balm for so long that Kel couldn’t begin to pinpoint the place in time that he’d grown fond of having a team at his back—at hearing Quinn and Luke’s cheerful laughter and jokes as they checked off another victory for Fireteam Ward, at Gil’s fond looks when he thought no one was looking, at how his ghosts were silenced when he sat down in quiet solidarity with Quinn who struggled to _hear_ her ghosts.

He leaves for the wilds and it’s the first time he’s been on his own for nearly two centuries. Kel can’t decide if he hates the sudden isolation or the fact that Gil had convinced him to be part of a team in the first place more.

In the first week he skirts the plaguelands, takes down half a dozen groups of Fallen holed up just within its borders. He feels empty. Nothing.

In the second he tears a bloody path through the Cosmodrome, clearing out Rasputin’s bunker (just in case) and wreaking havoc on the forces of Hive as pure vengeance for what they’d wrought on his team. Still, nothing.

By the third week he hesitantly makes his way to the final battleground of Twilight Gap, the memories of fighting by his old friend’s side and the few, rare laughs Kel had ever had after being resurrected making him want to raze the entire memorial to the ground. He doesn’t have the raw power of a Titan or the capability for devastation like a Warlock, so he makes do with firing a few rockets at the creaking and rusted artillery and watches them tumble down the cliffs with a numb disinterest.

Echo stopped trying to speak with him after the first week, instead opting to ping messages onto his heads-up display whenever Luke tried to contact him or the Vanguard attempted to deliver updates or request missions he was in the area for. Cayde confirms Kel’s theory that he’d been researching for the purpose of hunting Quinn by sending him updates on said research.

He’s not feeling particularly endeared to the Vanguard these days and he disregards both the updates and the assignments. Quinn was gone just as assuredly as Gil was gone and he wasn’t about to get his hopes up.

He’d had enough loss. In both of his lives.

He had no reason to return to the City. None.

Uncharted territory is where he finds himself by the end of the third week, somewhere across the sea as he sought even more distance from the place he’d so foolishly called home for the last few hundred years. He doesn’t have a clue what he’s looking for or _why_ he’s looking for it, but there’s an indescribable pull that’s carving his path as he treks through the ravines and forests by foot.

He wonders if it’s a Hunter instinct or just a Kel instinct—or something else entirely.

He comes upon a swathe of ruins nearly reclaimed by nature, evidence of a post-Collapse civilization making itself known in the form of ancient buildings rebuilt with scrap and anything the people back then could pull together for shelter. It was empty, a ghost town with some kind of dangerous heaviness settled thick enough to choke over it.

Something happened here. Something tantamount to cataclysmic that had nothing to do with the onset of the Collapse. Something _final_.

He can see a pair of massive Hive seeds, one crashed through an old, rotting building and another cracking up through what remains of a paved street. Only a pair, and he can’t see any telltale signs of the Hive repurposing the area for their own gain—just an isolated group, then, lingering to feed on the remaining light and darkness trapped within the energy of the place before they moved on.

A pair of Knights notice him.

Kel stands there as they roar and open fire on him, the glow of the heated weapons the Hive used reflecting in his visor as they paint a violent slash of color through the air towards him.

He considers not moving. He truly does—considers not moving, ordering his ghost to abandon him and to head back to the tower without him.

She chirps at him in alarm, as vocal as she’s been in weeks.

Kel knows that’s not how it works. He’s seen the ghost shells, broken and forlorn, scattered along the coasts and ruins of pre-Collapse civilization. Their light had run out before they could find their guardian, or they’d been attacked and damaged by the monsters that saw the little creatures as a light-filled treat to feast on. Or they’d simply given up.

He may feel like one of those broken and empty shells, but he won’t suffer Echo the same fate. She was perhaps the one thing he thought he had left that he wouldn’t forsake like that.

Kel dives, feels the heat of the bolts of Hive fire boil the air where he’d been standing seconds ago; he wonders if his cloak, already ripped and worn from hundreds of years of battle and survival, had been singed by the close call. Whirling into action his auto rifle coughs out bullets as fast as he can aim and pull the trigger.

His shields drop far enough that he’s forced to seek cover, slipping under a broken garage door and into one of the ramshackle buildings lining the ruined street. The Knights and Thrall howl for his blood and light, seeking him as he slips away from them.

He finds a place to recuperate, eyes slipping to the indicator Echo provides for him for the status of his shields as he reloads. Once it blinks and disappears he leaves the building, sweeping the new street slowly and carefully. He can still hear the Hive somewhere around the corner, unaware of his presence.

Good—he can flank them.

As his eyes sweep the other direction he freezes, taking in the sight of a body slumped there before him. Bones, nothing but dust and rags, and Kel would have mistaken it for any poor soul lost when this settlement had been overrun or abandoned—but Echo makes a noise of surprise, telling him that there’s the faintest signature of light emanating from these bones.

Light that felt…different.

Next to the body rests a gun. Revolver. Custom. It looks like it had been warped, swallowed alive by something dark and vile and spat back out; black and sharp and sickly green, and though it must have been abandoned for decades if not longer and was partially covered by growing weeds and grass it looks as though it had been sitting there for just a few days.

It pulses with dark green light almost eagerly. Almost like it had been waiting for him to stumble upon it and it was happy he was here. And there, again, was the pull he had been feeling. The pull that had led him here.

Shouldering his rifle Kel kneels and digs the handgun out from the weeds grasping at it, wrapping his fingers around the grip of the handgun and hefting it lightly to test its balance.

Echo makes a noise of disapproval as though telling him to leave it.

Kel looks up from the body before him and sees a little girl with blonde curls and a pink dress standing on the opposite side of the street staring at him with unblinking, bright blue eyes. He goes rigid. When he blinks, the little girl vanishes.

His grip tightens on the handgun and he brushes the unbidden vision aside at the same time something whispers in his head.

**_My name is Thorn, oh bearer mine  
I will bring ruin to those who wronged you._ **

This, too, he brushes aside; it isn’t the first time he’s dealt with whispers and shadows in the back of his mind and vision, and he knows this is no different. A lot is on his mind and he hasn’t been sleeping well.

Just hallucinations. Nothing more.

Shaking his head, Kel turns away from the sun-bleached bones of the poor soul whose name he’ll never know.

When he returns to finish off the Hive still clawing at the door he’d vanished through the bullets that bite through their chitinous forms comes from a vile handgun that purrs at the back of his mind, pleased with the carnage and the way the Hive corrode and collapse under the gun’s fire.

He feels ill.

It’s the first thing he’s felt since his brother in arms died.

* * *

When he returns to the tower, Kel thinks he shouldn’t have come back at all.

He has no idea what even drove him _to_ come back, but the way people greet him with concern and ask him _how he’s doing_ as though he weren’t just an empty shell who remembers too much feels too much _hurts too much,_ or greet him as though nothing has changed, it grates on his already frayed nerves. As though his best friend isn’t dead, as though he cares for their idle chatter and words.

When he blinks stonily at them, knowing they can’t see his eyes, he stares until they get uncomfortable and turn away. He sees the little blonde girl with curls and a pretty dress staring back at him when they move out of the way.

They don’t see her. It’s been hundreds of years since he has.

Kel makes his way to the Vanguard hall, feels Eris Morn’s three stolen eyes burn into his back and Shaxx’s sharp gaze follow him as he passes, and when he moves down the steps towards the Vanguard’s war table all three members stop to stare at him.

He doesn’t bother to address it, though he feels his skin crawl with frustration at the response.

Moving to stand in front of Cayde— _why was he still here, if he was so sure Quinn was still alive? Why wasn’t he actually_ doing _anything? It’s been a month, is she_ dead _?—_ as though the wary, concerned looks from the other two weren’t making a deep anger he hasn’t felt in years stir inside him.

“Been gone a long time, guardian,” Cayde drawls, one hand still resting idly on his maps and papers spread in front of him. Kel supposes that when you’re on the brink of extinction and fighting an impossible war, a month _could_ be considered a long time. “What’d you find?”

Everyone knows about the Dare. Everyone knows how Cayde-6 became Hunter Vanguard.

Andal Brask had been a good man.

The whispering and aggravation at the back of his mind quiets with relief that Cayde, at least, seems to understand the desire to avoid speaking of the dead and lost. “Mapped out some territory.” Kel replies evenly; in his periphery he can see the way Zavala shifts in irritation.

No ventures into dark zones without fireteams. Ever.

Cayde however steps to one side and gestures to the archaic map he has spread across the table. “Show me.”

So Kel does, pointing to parts of the map and indicating where he found a Fallen Ketch docked, or Hive seeds—that old city in the dark zone he had combed through. Explains what he saw and what he thinks of it, what might be going on or whether it was worth looking into further.

He does this not because it’s his duty to but because something pulled him back to the City just as it had pulled him away, and without the friend that had been helping to guide him for centuries Kel has fallen back into that old Hunter habit of following the paths that call to him. He’s not sure what it was or why, so for now he’s simply going through the familiar motions he’d gotten used to while working as part of a fireteam even though it no longer felt like he had one.

When he finally looks up from the map, done with recounting his travels, he freezes as his eyes land once more on the little girl, standing on the other side of the table and seemingly standing on her toes to try and reach up for Ikora’s ghost.

“Was that all you found?” Cayde asks. Kel hears the caution in it, the double meaning, and understands Cayde’s intent for asking it.

The little girl looks towards the entrance of the hall and Kel follows her gaze. Standing there is Luke, halfway down the steps and staring at him. Kel’s fingers twitch in search for the handgun he’d found.

He blinks. The little girl vanishes. “Yes. That was all I found.”

Without waiting for confirmation, Kel turns away from the table and heads for the stairs at a pace that could just barely be considered a rush, his shoulder bumping against Luke’s roughly and nearly knocking the Warlock off-balance.

Luke tries to say something to him as he leaves, but the whispering is back and Luke’s voice is lost somewhere in the red-hot static boiling in Kel’s veins. He’s close to the burning fire of a Golden Gun let loose and Kel knows that if he doesn’t leave the hall behind, that Golden Gun will be turned on Luke.

Much as something dark and hateful clamors for that exact thing, Kel doesn’t want it.

Maybe if he says it enough he’ll convince himself.

It’s as he reaches the steps to ascend into the plaza that Eris finally decides to insert herself in his way, stopping him and sidestepping to block him every time he tries to move around her. “You found one.”

“I found a few ‘ones’ while out there.” Kel replies, irritated. Another step to the side, blocked again by the woman warped by darkness and Hive, teetering somewhere between the Dark and the Light and leaving his skin crawling—something he’s never felt in her presence before. “Be more specific or get out of my way.”

“It’s whispering to you.” She says, her gauze-covered eyes glowing through the thin fabric and dripping with ichor focused intently on his face as though she could catch his own eyes through his visor. And maybe she _could_. “I can hear it, too. _Where did you find it_?”

Shaxx is watching the exchange from further back in the hall.

Kel doesn’t answer, still blocked from moving forward, and he’s tempted to shove her aside as he had done with Luke; he hasn’t felt this openly aggressive in a long time but he’s falling back into it easily as though he’d never stopped.

It felt good. It takes all his willpower to ignore the urge.

“A sorrowful weapon, bleak and dripping with _carnage_ and _hate_. What does it promise you? Does it promise you vengeance? Purpose? _Freedom_? They are all _lies_. You will find no true answers from its treacherous mouth, guardian.” Her voice is thick with spite and venom, growing thicker with every word, and it occurs to Kel that he’s never heard Eris so _emotive_ before.

Ironic, considering his own behavior.

The little girl is back, pouting up at her with furrowed brows.

**_I promise you solace, oh bearer mine.  
I promise you certainty_.**

His lips twitch. More hallucinations. He’ll feel better once he’s gotten some rest—that’s all he needs.

“It speaks to you now,” Eris breathes, her fingers curling around the gently glowing soul stone she carries and her lips pull back in a feral snarl, “do not listen to it! It is hungry and it _lies_.”

**_I promise you vindication. I promise you vengeance.  
_** **_All that exists struggles to exist. Blade versus flesh. Blade versus eternity._**  
**_You know this. You have seen it. You have suffered it. In death and in Life._**

**_My name is Thorn, and I promise you the power to continue existing_**.

Kel’s skin crawls with illness again, and something soot-blackened and dark and full of sickeningly sweet comfort curls claws around his thoughts; he gives in to his urge and finally pushes past Eris Morn with her haunting call following his rapidly retreating form.

“Do not lose yourself, guardian! Your light yet burns!”

* * *

He enters the Crucible at Shaxx’s insistence. He represents no faction, plays with those far from lacking in skill; game of choice is Rumble. He still doesn’t feel like playing as part of a team, not when what was left of his was the one _responsible_ for the other half being lost.

Shaxx says it’ll clear his head, get his mind focused forward instead of stuck in the past. Stuck on events that couldn’t be changed.

He indulges in his old friend’s suggestion, not because he thinks it’ll clear his head (it won’t) but because a deep, darkened part of his soul craves the mind-numbing violence he’s dirtied his boots with for centuries, craves the ability to let loose, put his anger and emptiness outward rather than holding it in for a change.

He wants blood. Wants to see the light bleed from his peers as he shows them how far from his level they are, to prove to them and himself that if he had been on that mission in the Dreadnaught—

He shakes his head and steps around a corner with his auto rifle at the ready, firing a hail of bullets into the back of an unprepared Warlock. The Warlock’s ghost blinks at him balefully, facets spreading around the glowing orb of light that represented the creature’s light and life as it works on reviving its guardian.

The only reason Kel doesn’t glare back at it is because he’s at the top of the scoreboard and doesn’t have the time nor the care.

He’s leaps and bounds ahead of the other participants and on a killstreak, much to Shaxx’s delight, and it’s likely why the other participants seemed to have abandoned their crosshairs being aimed at each other and instead pointed them all in _his_ direction.

He didn’t mind. It just gave him more chance to prove his skill.

He normally didn’t enjoy the Crucible, caring only for its ability to hone team coordination and personal skill—but now, _now_ he was enjoying it. He can’t point to what changed, but he can’t say it was a bad one.

It was… _thrilling_ , he supposed. It made him feel _alive_.

He ducks under a natural archway in the Venusian landscape, glancing at the radar in his HUD.

He sees the flash of red on his radar a split second too late; something solid slams into his side and he just barely catches himself before it throws him from his feet and knocks him prone. His rifle isn’t so lucky—it goes flying out of his hands, sliding to a halt a few yards away.

The Titan that had slammed into him gives him no time to recover, closing the small distance his shoulder charge had created and snapping an elbow into Kel’s helmet before he can block it. The strike leaves a nasty ringing in his ears and this finally throws him off-balance and his knee brushes the ground.

Kel tips over and rolls with the motion away from the Titan, ignoring the vertigo the action causes. He hears a shotgun round rip through the air, lodging into the course gravel of the landscape he’d just vacated.

He bounds away from the Titan, using a pulse of his light to propel himself further with a jump—another shotgun blast shatters his shields and Echo beeps a sharp warning at him as he retreats.

Somewhere in the scattered rocks and Vex monoliths in the arena he loses the Titan and he circles back around to where he’d dropped his rifle with Echo’s assistance; the Titan had the same idea as soon as he’d lost sight of him, apparently, and Kel is forced to duck back under cover when he appears in sight, booted feet planting firmly on the ground right next to the rifle.

He was waiting.

Kel’s shields had recovered, but that shotgun had a quick firing rate and it would bite through them faster than he’d be able to grab his gun and take the Titan down. The moment he got within range, if the first shot didn’t knock him out of the running the second would, and Kel would still have to aim and fire.

Point blank range or not, rifles didn’t have the same kind of close-range stopping power.

He needed to think of something fast. It wouldn’t be long before the other combatants caught up to them and joined the fray, and Kel didn’t hold out hope that they’d end their grudge and go after each other rather than eliminate the one in first place and _then_ return to the regular slaughter.

The handgun he’d found. It was still in his inventory—

He grimaces. No, he’s got a solar-fueled grenade ready and a throwing knife still on his belt, he could make use of those.

But—

Fingers twitching, Kel orders Echo to summon the hand cannon, spins out of cover, and takes aim.

The first shot knocks out most of the Titan’s shields, and something sick and corrosive eats away at the rest before he even fires a second time; Kel frowns. When he fires again the shot snaps through the Titan’s helmet and he drops like a stone, the heavy thud drowned out by Shaxx calling an end to the match.

He thought there’d been at least another minute left on the timer and he frowns at the empty HUD on his visor. Had he reached the point cap? Why was the Titan’s ghost not visible and working on a revive?

His ghost is quiet.

He’s won either way and he decides it doesn’t matter much. Leisurely and with a heavy exhale he moves to retrieve his auto rifle; considering it for a moment, he glances at the jagged thorn of a weapon in his other hand. Echo chirps her disapproval in his ear, but obediently stows the rifle and transmats a holster onto his thigh for the hand cannon.

Kel returns to the tower to see if there are any open bounties on the board in the plaza. He may as well go out and do his duty to the City while he got used to the new weapon.

He’d been wrong—the match _had_ helped him feel better.

**_You are strong. The rest are weak. You need to show them.  
This is the way it should be. This is the way it is_**.

The whispers are getting louder. Clearer. More insistent. Something about this one in particular gives him pause, but when he tries to grasp the cause it slips through his fingers like sand. He dismisses it, thumbing the grip of the gun holstered on his thigh.

He’s been dealing with the hallucinations for hundreds of years. They’d gotten worse after Demi’s death. They were worse now, after losing Gil. He knows what to expect.

They’ll fade with time. They always do.

* * *

When Kel approaches the war room a few days later it’s much louder than he ever remembers it being; their voices are at a volume that he can hear, indistinct and muffled, as far back as the stairs Eris liked to hover by.

Her typical haunt is devoid of her heavy presence.

Shaxx, too, is absent from his usual spot in the Vanguard hall, the space conspicuously and unnervingly empty with the large Titan and his even larger energy gone.

Kel’s footsteps pause momentarily when he catches Arcite, Shaxx’s quartermaster frame, staring at him. He stares back wordlessly until the frame returns to work, muttering in displeasure at whatever messages it’s receiving from the various factions invested in the upcoming Crucible season.

And then he notices the war room’s doors are closed.

It’s an unfamiliar sight—Kel can only recall one time in his hundreds of years of undeath that those doors had ever closed: the crisis on the moon. Humanity’s first contact and war with the Hive, and the First Fireteam to have descended into the Hellmouth. The Vanguard had always adopted an open-door policy from its formation to the modern day, and he wonders what kind of cataclysm must have occurred to force them to close their doors to discuss it.

Did the new war with the Taken warrant such a closed-door meeting?

Kel resumes his walk to the door and pauses just before it, the voices beyond still muffled but more distinct now.

“—he’s not fit for active duty. Is that what you’re saying, Shaxx?” Zavala asks.

Shaxx’s voice, easily the loudest in the room as was the norm for the Titan, answers with a kind of fury Kel hasn’t heard in many years. “I’m saying he’s not fit to be within the City _walls_ , much less on active duty or participating with either the skilled _or_ the under-trained in my Crucible.”

“May I remind you, Lord Shaxx, that _you_ are the one that invited him to participate in that match in the first place.” Ikora says calmly.

“I don’t need to be reminded!” Shaxx responds, the statement punctuated by what sounds like a fist slamming down onto a solid surface. “Had I any idea that he had a weapon that could cause true death, I never would have! Do you think I would ever _willingly_ invite another Red Death incident?”

There’s a heavy beat of silence and Kel’s frown deepens; he remembers the incident well. Everyone had heard of it. Everyone had talked about it. A small massacre caused by a gun prototype found in the wild whose designs had immediately been confiscated and destroyed.

“Don’t think that’s what Ikora was saying, Shaxx,” he hears Cayde’s voice, a parallel to Ikora’s in its even calm—rare, for the typically aloof and jovial hunter, “none of us want a repeat of that.”

“So what is it you’re suggesting, Shaxx? Banishment is a heavy punishment, and what happened _could_ have been an accident.” Zavala, again, now sounding uneasy.

No one had been banished from the City since Osiris—and he, as far as Kel was aware, was one of only two in the history of the City that had ever suffered such a punishment. It was far from a light punishment to consider.

Who the hell was the subject of their conversation?

The next voice that speaks up catches Kel off guard and sends a wave of anger roiling through him, his fists clenching at his sides. “Why is banishment even on the table? He’s just—he’s just messed up from what happened, right? He couldn’t have meant it.” Within the same sentence Luke’s tone wavers between desperately upset to insistent. “He just needs time—”

“ _To kill more guardians?_ ” Shaxx demands, voice rising another level in volume. “Absolutely not. I will not have _more_ deaths in my Crucible, and I refuse to simply ignore a threat to guardians _outside of it_ either.”

Zavala’s responding tone is sharp and unyielding, a reminder to Shaxx that though he was a valued voice to the Vanguard he _wasn’t_ in a place to state what he just had. “This isn’t a decision for you to make on your own, Lord Shaxx. It will be brought to the Consensus, and it’s why we’re having this discussion in the first place.”

Something is purring at the back of his mind again and Kel glances down at the hand cannon strapped to his thigh. If he believed in weapons with personalities (just tools. Just dead things. just like guardians.) then he might have believed it _enjoyed_ all this heightened emotion.

Whether or not Shaxx intended to respond to Zavala’s warning, Cayde interrupts them both—Kel wonders if it’s to attempt to diffuse the argument before it grew violent. “You said he was usin’ a new gun, Shaxx.” His voice is again eerily calm and even. It’s rare that Cayde was the level-headed one out of the three. “What did it look like?”

“Hand cannon.” Shaxx huffs, either cowed by Zavala or sufficiently distracted by the topic change. “Black and green. Sharp ridges along the barrel, glowing between the seams. It looked _sick_. Vile. Like the Darkness itself spat it out.”

Kel realizes, then, that they’re talking about _him_.

“You got a recording of it?”

“I did.”

“Show me.”

Silence follows and Kel twitches impatiently, agitated.

Eyes are on his back again; when he turns around, Arcite’s glowing, unblinking eyes are once again burning holes into him. It’s only because he doesn’t want to alert the people inside the war room to his presence that he doesn’t demand the frame _minds its own business_.

Bristling, Kel ignores it.

“What _is_ that?” Ikora breathes, so quiet Kel almost misses it.

“Thorn,” Is Cayde’s simple, assured response. His voice is so caustic that it shocks him—he’s never heard the Exo sound so full of raw hatred.

“You can’t be serious, Cayde,” Ikora says. “Dredgen Yor vanished centuries ago—no one knows what happened to him, what are the chances that the fabled weapon none of us could ever confirm even _existed_ shows up in the hands of one of our own?”

He knows that name. Like with the Red Death incident, every guardian does—but unlike Red Death, no one knew the story behind the hushed way it was mentioned, only that it was as feared as any of the enemies they faced in the wilds.

“Tell me, Ikora,” Cayde replies, “where did the fables come from? That gun’s as real as the one that killed its owner and the man that wields it. And that— _that_ is Thorn. That’s the gun that killed Pahanin and Jaren Ward. The one that killed dozens more guardians before ‘em.”

Zavala sounds unconvinced. “And you know this for a fact?”

“I do.”

“And you never brought this anonymous guardian up _or_ the connection of Pahanin’s and Jared Ward’s disappearances to us _why_?”

“Ain’t a guardian, just a man with a Golden Gun.” Cayde corrects Ikora, clearly unconcerned with either her or Zavala’s skepticism. “And the man likes his privacy, doesn’t want anything to do with our politics. It doesn’t _matter_. What matters is Thorn’s on our doorstep, a guardian killer, in the hands of a troubled guardian that ain’t thinkin’ clearly.”

The whispering at the back of Kel’s head intensifies, almost a hissing. He finds his lips pulling back in a snarl; he wasn’t _troubled_ , and the gun he had found was just that—a _gun_. What vile deeds may or may not have been performed with it didn’t change the fact that it was nothing but a tool.

“Hunger…it is _hungry_. It has been so long and he is _so angry_ …” Eris mutters from somewhere within; he has to lean forward to hear her clearly.

His snarl turns into a sneer; Eris Morn saw evil in _everything_ , and he doesn’t find it hard to believe that she’s simply projecting her losses onto everything she can. Damn the truth, the Hive had warped her and her thoughts, twisted her into something that straddled the line between the Light and the Dark.

How the Vanguard could see her _opinion_ as credible was beyond him.

But a stray thought occurs to him and briefly stifles his building anger—hadn’t she lost her friends and allies in the Hellmouth? Hadn’t she suffered the same painful loss he had?

“So we force him to turn it over and we destroy it.” Zavala says after a heavy pause as they all considered Eris’s words. “And we take him off active duty until his head is cleared.”

Static washes through his thoughts and swats aside the thought that gave him pause, replacing it with that same wash of tidal rage. His fists curl even tighter and he feels his light spark with electricity rather than warm flame for the first time in centuries.

The whispers, the hissing, the hallucinations crescendo into a near roar between his ears, insistent and angry. He feels fingers wrap around his palm and looks down.

The little girl with blonde curls and bright, open blue eyes stares up at him. Her mouth doesn’t move but he can hear her speaking to him, the voice so familiar but distant from his memories. Indistinct, but clear enough that he _knows_ it’s her.

**_They don’t understand, oh father mine._  
** **_You are strong. That guardian was weak. This universe eats the weak._**  
**_You could make them understand. All of them._**  
**_Do you understand?_**

He should be afraid. He should be terrified. He killed someone, whether intentionally or not. He killed a fellow guardian when there were already such a small number of them compared to the innumerable enemies they faced.

Deep down, he feels that terror mixing with the anger and the ill feeling that had overcome him when he first found the weapon.

A dark undercurrent accompanies his long-lost daughter’s voice when she wordlessly speaks again.

**_Teach them, oh father mine.  
Start with the one who wronged you._ **

Everything else is drowned out by the roaring in his mind, a cold grasp of fury urging him to finally step forward and shove the doors to the war room open.

Shaxx is next to Ikora, both closest to the doors, and Zavala is on the other end of the long table. Eris is apart from the group, halfway between Cayde and Zavala. Cayde stands in his usual place in front of his maps and in the middle of the table.

Luke is next to him.

All eyes are on Kel. Wary, guarded, surprised—and in Cayde’s case, uncharacteristically empty.

His movements careful and measured, Kel moves down the steps towards them and if he realizes that his little girl’s fingers have become the solid grip of a black hand cannon, he doesn’t acknowledge it. “My head _is_ cleared.” He snaps. “If anyone needs to be taken off active duty, it’s _him_.”

If Kel had been there instead of Luke, Gil would still be there. Quinn wouldn’t be gone. Luke wasn’t _fit_ to be in the field, on a team, responsible for the lives of his fellow guardians. Gil had taken him under his wing and now Gil was _dead_.

Luke blinks at the open aggression Kel willingly displays, eyebrows lifting in confusion. “ _…Me_?”

Though his eyes are settled rigidly on Luke, Kel is aware that everyone’s attention is on him. Save for Cayde, who has turned away from him and is leaning with his palms flat on the table and eyes focused but unseeing on the maps under them, everyone in the room is ready to intervene, ready to stop him.

From what?

Shaxx’s fury would make anyone else buckle under the weight of it, but not Kel. He knows Shaxx, has known him for hundreds of years, and though he’s not fool enough to underestimate the Titan nor holds any belief that he could square off against him in a fair fight Kel isn’t afraid of the man.

He doesn’t fear anyone in this room—fears utterly nothing he can recall.

He had been there during the Collapse a lifetime ago. Nothing had frightened him since.

Luke shifts uncomfortably under Kel’s malevolent, heavy stare, shuffling slightly back and away from him even though Kel stops several feet away. Then he freezes and recognition dawns in his eyes, followed by pain and resignation. “Kel, if this is about Gil—”

His shoulder twitches as though he were going to draw up his gun and fire. Right into Luke’s skull. It would only take two shots. Just two. “Don’t.”

“I did what I could! He told me to r—”

Kel disappears in a blink and reappears right next to Luke, ozone tinting the air in the room from the crackle of arc energy; he spins and wraps his fingers around Luke’s throat, forcing him back against the surface of the table and cutting off his protest.

Thorn snaps up from where it had rested uneasily at his hip, barrel settling firmly against the Warlock’s forehead.

He doesn’t flinch when the sound of weapons readying around the room reaches his ears. Neither Cayde nor Eris has moved, but everyone else now had a gun trained on him.

“You ran, right? You’re a coward that let him _die_.” His voice is frigid. The green light under Thorn’s twisted frame pulses as though eager.

“There was an _army_ of Taken, Kel. They took Quinn, I couldn’t—”

He pulls the hammer back on his hand cannon with a click that firmly and finally silences his teammate.

Cayde speaks up, then, calm despite the scene occurring right next to him. “Eris, that thing’s evil I take it?”

Her responds is a plagued, dreadful moan. “ _Fingers in my brain_.”

“Right.” Cayde moves so fast, then, that Kel doesn’t even see it happen; his head tips to one side when the barrel of Cayde’s Ace of Spades is pressed to the side of his helmet. When the Exo speaks again, eyes unwavering from Kel, it’s directed to the others in the hall. “Rest of you ‘cept for Eris, leave for just a minute. And yes, Zavala, that means _you_.”

No one moves immediately. Ikora is the first to nod in acceptance and turn to leave, Zavala following after. Shaxx takes the longest to abide the request but he goes as well, shutting the war room’s doors behind him.

Cayde waits for a beat before speaking again. “Let him go, guardian.”

Kel doesn’t take his eyes off Luke. “No.” His finger is on the trigger. The whispering has grown into a hum, some kind of dreadfully beautiful melody, one that calls for him to finish it—to let it consume the light of the traitor standing in front of him.

The urge gnaws at the gray matter of his brain, the undead cells of his body given new life by the Traveler. It burns through his every nerve and his fingers are curled so tightly around the gun’s grip that it’s nearly painful.

**_He is weak._  
** **_You are strong._**  
**_Show them the law and the Logic._**  
**_Show them the truth._**

He wants to. Kel _wants_ to. Luke had left Gil to die—Gil, the man that had considered the young Warlock something of a son, the man Kel had considered his closest friend and brother in arms for hundreds of years. It was Luke’s fault that Gil was dead, Luke’s fault that Quinn was gone. The loss of Demi had been decades ago, around the same time Luke had joined the team, and Kel _knows_ it must have been his fault, too.

Their team had shrunk from five to two. It was _his_ fault.

Wasn’t it?

It was only fair. Put a bullet in his skull. Vengeance. Vindication. Not just for Demi and Quinn and Gil, but also for the wife and daughter Kel shouldn’t even _remember_. For the rebirth he had never asked for and the war he never wanted to fight.

If he did, Cayde wouldn’t hesitate to put him down. He knew this; rare as it was, Cayde was every bit the leader Zavala and Ikora were, no matter how much he denied it and claimed he wasn’t cut out for the station he’d fallen into. He knew when to be merciful, and he knew exactly when to show no mercy.

Echo wouldn’t be allowed to revive him—she’d be stopped if she tried to. It would be a true death, one Kel wouldn’t be able to come back from just like the Titan he had unwittingly killed in the Crucible, just like Luke should he pull the trigger.

Death upon death upon _death_.

His blood chills as he finally recognizes the hum at the back of his mind, the words indistinct through the roaring of whispers and demands and promises but no less familiar in their finality.

It was a lure to release—to freedom from an endless existence of nothing but loss and pain, from an existence he had never asked for and a return to the peaceful silence of death and to the ghosts had he left behind in his first life. Freedom from the Traveler’s war and the losing, hopeless battle they’d all been forced into fighting.

But it _wasn’t_ a hopeless fight. Though it seemed that way so often that it was hard to see otherwise, there was a difference between a lost cause and a hopeless one, and the difference was in keeping that hope alive long enough to turn to the tide.

Gil wouldn’t have ordered Luke to flee the battle if he didn’t think there was a chance to turn that tide. Kel knew his friend too well to think that he didn’t.

He knew the difference. Why had it taken Kel so long to see the difference himself?

He feels a phantom tug on the hem of his cloak, sees the little girl in the edge of his vision, and he grits his teeth. The hand holding Thorn suddenly begins to shake, nearly imperceptibly. Was it from rage? Or was he more afraid than he was willing to admit to himself?

“You aren’t the first guardian to lose a partner, hunter.” Cayde’s voice is still calm and even but filled with the kind of tranquil fury that the Hunter Vanguard hid behind jokes and good humor. A calculated coldness that only a handful of other guardians that knew him had ever seen or heard.

He hears the click of Cayde dropping the hammer on Ace, just as Kel had moments ago. “Last chance. Put it down.”

Kel doesn’t move, and it takes him a long moment to get any words out. “Is Quinn still alive?” He asks. His jaw grinds and he tells himself to focus on something else, _anything_ else, other than the scratching in his skull telling him how much _easier_ it would be to just pull the trigger and finish it. It’s not his own.

The ghost wearing his daughter’s face was no hallucination anymore. It was a gun, and it was hungry.

If the question catches Cayde off guard it doesn’t show. “I know she is.”

He still doesn’t move. Kel stares at Luke for one, two, three heartbeats; Luke stares back and it’s the solemn acceptance in his face that eventually breaks the spell Kel could now see being cast. Luke blamed himself for the team’s loss.

Finally he drops Thorn to his side and steps back, releasing Luke from his hold.

Cayde lowers his gun as well but doesn’t holster it. His gaze is unblinking. “Gimme the gun, guardian. So that we can get you back out there.” He says, a little bit more of his usual warmth back in his voice.

Kel ignores him and instead turns to Eris. Surprisingly, she’s looking back like she had expected him to. “Is there a way to shut it up?” He asks.

“Sever the bond.” She says, but as he turns away she adds: “Hive magic warped that weapon, and it has been soaked in countless deaths and drank the light of many. It will never be clean. Never be silenced. And you _will_ listen to it.”

He stares at her, and it takes him a moment to understand what she truly meant—not that should he hold onto the weapon it’ll eventually take full hold of him, but that if he ever _underestimated_ it, it would succeed in dragging him into the same kind of end Dredgen Yor must have suffered.

He looks at Cayde, then, both of them quiet in light of Eris’s words. Cayde seems to pick up on the fact that Kel had no intention of turning the gun over, finally holstering Ace and stepping back.

Kel briefly considers asking Eris if the gun could be destroyed as Zavala had suggested earlier but he decides against it. He won’t take that risk, not with knowing how quickly and easily Thorn had gotten into his head, even considering how poorly he responded to Gil’s death.

Even now, he could hear it howling in rage at his denial of it. Hear it demanding that he _pull the trigger_ , finish the job, let it consume the light of Luke and Eris and Cayde and feed whatever dark magic powered it.

One thing was for certain: he couldn’t trust himself within the City’s walls so long as he held onto it.

He mutes his helmet comms long enough to tell Echo to ready his ship for transmat, and then he holsters Thorn back into place on his thigh, meeting Cayde’s gaze and ignoring Luke’s confused stare. “Contact me when you plan to get her back.” He says.

The engines of his ship roar as it flies over the tower and Echo transmats him into its confines before he hears Cayde’s response.

He leaves the City behind again—this time, somehow, with an even heavier heart than before.


	2. Chapter 2

Almost two weeks later, Cayde’s call comes at an inopportune moment.

Middle of a firefight with a group of Fallen that he’s sorely underestimated, and he makes the mistake of opening the line at the exact time he sees the Captain bearing down in him. Before Cayde can start to speak Kel grunts and calmly says, “one second,” before diving out of the way of a pair of shock blades that descend on him.

Reaching for his belt and one of the sticky grenades resting there Kel rushes forward, ducking underneath the Fallen’s four arms and two blades, not stopping to look behind him as the Captain roars in offense.

An explosion causes the rocks under his feet to shudder. A blink of red disappears from his HUD radar.

The comm line, surprisingly, remains patiently silent.

He takes stock of the enemies left: a dozen Fallen, all of them conveniently grouped up.

Propelling himself forward he leaps from the ground and pushes off the surface of a broken pillar, light roiling around him and shrouding his body in rippling flames—flames that he pulls handfuls of etheric, fiery knives from that fly from his hands too fast for the Fallen to dodge.

Kel lands as those knives erupt around him, and when the dust settles there are no Fallen bodies to be seen. Just ash and smoldering, blackened shrubs.

His fingers flex over the grip of the hand cannon held in them, eyes scan for any more enemies in waiting.

Cayde can’t seem to keep silent any longer. “Was that the trick I taught you? Tell me that was the trick I taught you. It was the trick I taught you, wasn’t it.”

Kel ignores him, glancing at Echo as she materializes to survey the area. “Did you have news?”

“We know how to find her.” Cayde answers without missing a beat or acknowledging the snub.

He holsters Thorn and turns away from the battlefield he’d just cleared, and Echo calls in his ship without prompting. He doesn’t need to hear more explanation than that, but Cayde gives it anyway, voice briefly drowned out by the roar of engines.

Kel wonders if he does it just to reassure himself that Quinn was still alive and they _would_ get her back now that they had a lead.

Luke’s assumption that the Taken had pulled her through a rift into the Ascendant Plane had been correct—and her ghost, after having found a way out of that alternate dimension, had gone on for several minutes about how terrifying it was until Ikora had gently urged it to focus.

Apparently she had managed to turn the Taken’s own paracausal powers against them, tearing a hole in that reality herself. A rip only big enough for Glyph to slip through, allowing it to return to the Tower, frantic and exhausted by the long and rushed journey between Saturn and Earth.

It knew where to enter the Ascendant realm to find her—the tricky part would be hoping they got there quickly enough to keep whatever lurked there from either corrupting or killing her.

Kel’s fingers twitch near his holster and he wonders: were they one and the same?

He wonders: what would Dredgen Yor have said?

He doesn’t dwell on it, spending the entire flight from Venus back to Earth silent and aware of the rising hum in the back of his head the closer he got after days of peace. Like when he had found it, Thorn was eager.

The little girl still appears in the corner of his eyes and tugs on the hem of his tattered cloak, begging for his attention. Sometimes he feels her fingers curl around his own, finding upon looking down that they’ve been replaced by the grip of a handgun that purrs at him to lift the barrel to his chin and pull the trigger.

It’s getting easier for him to recognize the signs and brush them aside, but the visions and whispers had intensified and Kel knows he’s on a short timer. Part of him wants to just toss the damn thing, but the rest of him doesn’t enjoy the thought of what might happen should someone that _hadn’t_ spent hundreds of years practicing intense self-control got their hands on it.

It had already proven itself to be a ticking time bomb for even him—how deep and easy would it sink its claws into someone else?

So, no, he wouldn’t toss the gun and hope for the best, and he had done everything from emptying every round of his rocket launcher’s ammo on it to dropping it in the lava flows of Venus in the hopes of destroying it without success.

The lava flow attempt had left him blacked out and he had woken later with the gun vibrating with furious energy.

That had been the first time Kel had felt true, all-consuming fear since his rebirth, and it was also the moment he realized that Thorn was more than just an accursed weapon in the City’s and in _humanity_ ’s history—it was a curse in and of itself.

One that he now held the responsibility of containing.

Eris had said there was a way to silence it, to make it easier to control, but in two weeks he’d had no luck finding how. He was running out of time, and quickly, but he had enough time for this detour. He wouldn’t abandon Quinn. Not when there was a chance she was still alive, not when Gil had given his life to make that chance possible, and not when her bright presence had burned away the shadows of his memories.

When he arrives on Earth he’s met with more greetings that he only briefly acknowledges before moving on. The less time he spent here, the better.

Eris is absent from her place in the Vanguard hall again, but Kel’s steps slow and then stop when he catches Shaxx’s gaze.

From behind their helmets they stare each other down. Shaxx’s fists are clenched tightly at his sides, and Kel sees arc energy sparking around them. He could apologize for what had happened—he _had_ violated the sanctity of the man’s training grounds, unknowingly or not—but it would be hollow and they both knew it.

There was nothing forgivable about murdering one of their own.

“Shaxx.”

The bold greeting sends a fresh ripple of furious static sparking over the titan’s form. “Dredgen.”

Kel can’t put a finger on whether it’s the icy treatment of a stranger he receives or the cold accusation behind the simple moniker, but the painful sting nearly cripples him. The former he had expected, but the latter?

He swallows it down and continues forward as though it didn’t affect him. Though Shaxx looked as though he was ready to intercept him and wanted to do nothing more, the titan remains in place and stares him down as he passes.

Like the last time he had approached the war room an argument is underway, only this time the doors are wide open and the subject, thankfully, _isn’t_ him. Ikora is silent, her hands clasped behind her back, while Zavala and Cayde butt their heads together.

“—I’m going, Zavala. You can run my hunters through Shiro or Marcus while I’m gone, but I’m _going_.” Cayde says, heated. Not quite as rare attitude for him, but still out of the norm.

“We need you _here_ , Cayde,” Zavala jabs a finger down onto the table in front of him to emphasize the statement, firm and unyielding in everything from his voice to his body language, “let her fireteam run the rescue op and we’ll send a temporary third with them.”

Cayde refuses to concede. “And I _need_ to be there.”

He’s the first to notice Kel’s entrance. His expression shifts to something neutral, but Kel doesn’t miss the quick glance to where Thorn is strapped to his thigh. Cayde’s gaze lingers—and then he gives Kel a nod in greeting. “I gotta be there for more than one reason.”

Kel returns his nod and understands.

Zavala doesn’t look happy about Kel’s presence, but whatever protests he has to it are held in check; he makes no effort, however, to hide his distrust. Ikora just gives him a once over and a long, considering look before lifting her chin ever so slightly in acknowledgement.

Two out of three wasn’t bad.

He says nothing, quietly continuing down the steps and veering off to the side once he’d reached the lowered landing and finding a spot apart from them where he can stand silent and still as a statue. Maybe they could pretend he wasn’t even there.

Distraction put aside Cayde continues his argument. “Only way you’re keepin’ me off this op, Zavala, is by puttin’ a lock on my ship.”

“Which you would find a way to break or circumvent.” Zavala sighs explosively, pushing away from the table and folding his arms over his chest. “This isn’t like Venus, or Mars, or any of our other warzones, Cayde. You’ll be heading into _Oryx’s_ turf, not one we control.”

“I know the risk. It’s worth it.” Cayde replies.

Silence falls, stretching out until Ikora speaks up. “Think of it this way, Zavala: there would be something especially inspiring for our guardians and City to see one of their leaders heading a direct strike into the heart of the enemy. Morale is something we’ve...been seeing a decline in recently.”

She must’ve been taking a backseat to mediate their argument.

Still, Zavala says nothing, leaning forward on the table again and showing his distaste openly. “And if you die, Cayde? If this fails?”

“It’s a risk all of _them_ take every single day. ‘Side from the fact we’re the ones givin’ orders, what makes us so special?”

Kel had already had more than enough respect for Cayde but that simple rhetorical question tips it even higher. 

Hunter Vanguards historically had the shortest details—in the years since the City’s beginning, both warlocks and titans had seen less than five leadership changes combined, and hunters alone had seen at least five—that were typically cut short thanks to a stereotypically flighty nature that usually got them killed. 

Cayde was the ‘youngest’ of the current Vanguard iteration, and he still knew what it felt like to be one of the rank and file. Zavala and Ikora had forgotten, and both look sobered by the statement.

In the end Zavala relents, and Kel wordlessly follows Cayde from the war room.

Luke is rushing across the plaza when they run into him, apparently trying to get to the war room himself. Cayde intercepts him before he bypasses them entirely, and Kel has to spend a handful of heartbeats carefully controlling his breathing and beating down the rage that threatens to resurge. _It wasn’t his fault_ , he reminds himself.

Cayde and Luke are staring at him when he returns to the present. Luke looks nervous, and Cayde was once again unreadable. He says nothing to it. “Are we going or not?”

He wants Quinn back within the City walls, safe. He wants to strike a blow against the Taken King, retaliation for his lost brother. The sooner he does both, the sooner he can retreat from the remnants of humanity and seek a way to control Thorn’s influence, keeping them safe from the threat it poses to all of them.

He keeps his distance on the flight from Earth to the rings of Saturn, remaining in the middeck of Cayde’s ship and listening while the Hunter Vanguard and Luke discuss their plan with Glyph giving input based on its knowledge of the chunk of the Ascendant Plane they’d be infiltrating.

Luke glances over at him every so often and Kel returns the looks from behind his helmet impassively, saying nothing; like with Shaxx, he knows that there aren’t words to make up for what he had almost done, and he doesn’t expect Luke to forgive him for it.

They journey deep into Oryx’s floating fortress once they arrive, directed by Glyph who had opted to share a ‘backpack’ with Cayde’s ghost, Sundance. Neither of his allies comment on him using Thorn, but Cayde does conspicuously order Luke to fall back and bring up the rear and Kel to take point, keeping himself between the two members of Fireteam Ward.

It was just as well; the proximity to so much Hive power and magic made the black static at the back of his mind roil, so Kel doesn’t mind pulling ahead so his back was to them rather than the other way around.

Pulling an Ascendant Soul from one of Oryx’s many ‘children’ on the Dreadnaught is no simple task but they accomplish it through equal amounts skill and raw determination—there would be no other way to force open the tear that Quinn had created.

Glyph’s directions lead them into a passage small enough all three of them have to duck down to file through. Luke’s vocal disgust about the chitinous growths and writhing hive worms surrounding them allows a brief moment of amusement to push back Thorn’s greedy grasping at his mind.

The passage darkens the further in they move, all the colors reaching his eyes suddenly washing out in shades of dark blues and grays and blacks as though a painter had stripped all of the vibrance from their universe.

The change from the plane of existence they call home and the Ascendant one is immediate and disorienting, as though they’d stepped through a pressurized barrier, the weight of the air around them suddenly oppressive and stifling. His light feels small and choked and he knows that he can’t remain here long.

Already, Thorn is drawing strength from the darkness.

The passage opens up after a ways and all three of them are struck dumb by the void that greets them, littered with cracked stone pathways and floating islands of sand and Hive growths consuming nearly every visible surface.

All around them a howling gale roars, dark clouds twisting and and swirling, obscuring every broken, floating pathway until a blinding flash of lightning within the unnatural storm around them sets the endless horizon alight and reveals them.

Along with the shadows of massive, writhing tendrils somewhere in the far distance within the smoke-like clouds of the storm.

The reports of Crota’s throne world, infiltrated by that six-man fireteam decades ago, hadn’t done this chaotic realm justice. It was terrifying in its seemingly endless, haunting expanse with the storm around them both deafening and silent at once.

He couldn’t see any of Oryx’s mindless army, but he can still feel countless eyes watching them, greedy and hungry, something ancient and eldritch and powerful waiting for them to fall into the yawning abyss below.

Thorn feels abnormally warm in his palm. It speaks to him for the first time in nearly a week, voice almost incomprehensible within the deafening cacophony of echoes that accompany it.

**_Do you hear it, oh bearer mine?_**  
**_The song. Listen to the song._**  
**_Hear its truth._**  


Light-wielders shouldn’t be here. _No one_ should be here. He knows this instinctively, and with a glance at the other two Kel knows that both of them have come to the same conclusion.

And Quinn had spent over a _month_ trapped in this hell. Alone.

A massive, distant roar rising over the silent gale snaps them all of them out of their horrified awe, reminding them of what they had come here for.

Cayde readies his Ace. “C’mon, let’s move.” To the point and devoid of his usual good humor. It’s a testament to the _wrong-ness_ of this place, to the danger of it. This wasn’t a place to underestimate and he knew there was no place for his usual levity and devil-may-care attitude here.

This time he leads the way, Glyph’s nervous voice over team comms telling them that Oryx’s throne world was _massive_ , and it had no idea how much further in Quinn may have traveled in its absence—they hadn’t been able to find somewhere safe to just bunker down, and it wasn’t likely she had found a way to since.

Monsters unlike anything they had ever seen wandered these teetering paths and inexplicable ruins, apparently, and it makes near-frantic emphasis that even if they couldn’t see any _now_ they were still _everywhere_.

So they moved forward carefully, following Glyph’s direction further into the throne world, all on high alert. Cayde quickly grew visibly frustrated with their slow pace, but with the roaring winds and fog around them they could scarcely see twenty feet ahead, and knowing that one wrong step sent them into a dark abyss that Kel doubted they could survive, ghost or not, they couldn’t afford to rush any more than they could afford to dawdle.

Several times Glyph had to call out for them to abruptly change direction or for them to stop before they walked right over the edge of one of the floating structures they traversed.

Kel had to reach out and grab Luke’s robes one of these times, just barely catching the warlock before he completely lost his footing. By the way he had gone completely still, staring at Kel as he held him over the edge, he’s sure Luke had wondered in that moment if he was going to just let him fall.

Thorn tells him that he should and then howls its rage into his mind when he instead pulls Luke back onto solid ground.

“Thanks.” Luke says, voice shaky.

Kel’s head hurts. “Don’t mention it.”

Twenty minutes pass. Then thirty. Only twice did they have to stop to fend off a wave of Taken-warped thrall, vicious and screeching at them as they scale and traverse the twisting and broken landscape of their King’s territory.

Cayde works flawlessly with both of them as though he’d been part of their team for years, and all the thrall and acolytes and knights unlucky enough to be in their path fall.

They take a moment to breathe after a wave of thrall clear, all acutely aware that they didn’t have many of them to spare. _Tick tock, tick tock_.

Luke breaks the silence first. “Anyone else a little worried we haven’t seen any of those monsters Glyph mentioned?”

“Think it’s somethin’ we should be grateful for, kid.” Cayde replies easily, flicking his wrist and dropping the empty magazine from his Ace so he can reload it.

“No,” both Cayde and Luke’s attention snap over to him at the single deathly certain word, “it’s not.”

“What’re you thinkin’, Kel?” Cayde’s hand flicks the new magazine into place within the barrel of his gun.

He struggles to find the words he wants to say through the deafening static between his ears. Thorn doesn’t want him to speak at all. “Oryx wants us to keep going. He wants us as deep into his world as he can get us.” He pauses, one of his gloved hands settling on his helmet over the crown of his head; he’s not sure why he knows this. Or _how_.

His fingers tighten around Thorn’s grip.

“I mean, we _know_ Oryx wants us dead, Kel. Why not just try to kill us _here_?” Luke asks. He doesn’t have to mention that thrall and knights were hardly a challenge for veteran guardians that had faced them before.

He can’t make the words form, though they’re on the tip of his tongue. He doesn’t know. He _does_ , but he doesn’t.

“‘Cause we’ll be farther from a way to escape,” Cayde supplies, and though there’s something crucial missing from the answer Kel knows that he’s dead to rights, “we find Quinn, he kills all of us at once. If he’s lucky, which he ain’t. This handsome mug ain’t dyin’ today.”

Kel needs to figure out what that crucial missing piece is. He _needs_ to. What _was_ it?

“Question is: _why_?” Cayde continues, and Kel sees him shift impatiently in the edge of his vision. He knows the answer to this question is important, just as Kel does, but he’s gotten far enough that his biggest concern is finding the woman he still hasn’t admitted he loves.

**_Listen to the song._**  
**_You know the words._**  
**_Let me sing to them, oh bearer mine._**  
**_Join me, let us sing together._**

“I don’t know.” Kel finally says, his tongue feeling leaden within his mouth. And it’s true that he doesn’t, but the melody between his ears is beginning to make horrific sense.

Cayde’s watching him with sharp eyes, likely trying to assess whether or not Thorn was getting its hooks into his head again—but he apparently comes to the conclusion that Kel had it under control, because he turns his back to him and then starts forward, calling for them to keep moving.

**_Fool_**.

‘ _Shut. Up._ ’ Kel thinks forcefully, his jaw grinding until it’s painful. Miraculously, Thorn retreats to an incessant buzz in the back of his head in response.

It gives him no comfort.

They move forward, minutes ticking by, until the silent thunder cracks and the roaring winds around them are broken by a single, piercing scream that causes gooseflesh to erupt all over his skin. All three of them stop dead in alarm that’s quickly replaced by urgency.

Cayde breaks into a run first, followed without prompting by him and Luke, and Kel can hear Luke muttering a staccato repetition of _shit, shit, shit_ from beside him.

It’s as they round a colossal stone column that Glyph speaks up, having remained silent long enough Kel had nearly forgotten it was there, its voice a shrill, tinny yell of warning over the comms: “ _Abyssal Knight!_ ”

Barely a second after it yells in warning a massive behemoth materializes right in front of them in an unnatural, crackling storm of something like dust or gravel. It looked like a Hive Knight in shape, but was so huge that their heads just barely reached the height of the bottom of its knees, and its chitin was soot-black and nearly invisible in the inky darkness of the Ascendant Plane.

They notice the massive blade raised above the creature’s head nearly too late.

The shockwave of the blade striking the already cracked and crumbling ground sends all three of them along with shattered debris flying; Kel feels his back slam into the jagged stone surrounding the path, the blow knocking wind from his lungs and stunning him.

On the other side of the path a blast of arc energy sends more debris scattering and Luke stumbles out of it on his knees. A few feet to Kel’s side Cayde crouches almost on his knees as well, feet dangerously close to the edge of the floating path and one of his hands curled tightly around the exposed root of a dead tree.

Shaking the daze from his eyes, Kel lifts Thorn as the Knight raises its blade again.

“ _Just run, you can’t damage these things!_ ” Glyph yells at them, panicked.

The issue, Kel thinks, wasn’t that they _couldn’t_ damage it—but that they didn’t have the time to figure out _how_. Was that hubris? He doesn’t care.

Reaching for his belt quickly Kel lobs a tripmine up onto the stone that towers above him, the explosive beeping only once before its sensor picks up the Knight and explodes. The Knight stumbles, and a furious roar that sounds less like a creature and more like a force of nature follows them as they push forward.

“Glyph, where is she?” Cayde slows slightly to raise his gun and fire off a few shots at the thrall that had picked an _awful_ time to come swarming from the shadows.

“ _Dead ahead, but there’s more knights!_ ”

Poor word choice.

The exo swears, word nearly lost to the horde of screaming thrall blocking their way forward and the heavy, lumbering steps of the Knight giving chase behind. “Luke, we need a path!” Cayde calls out.

Kel expects Luke to let out a whoop and a jubilant _‘let’s rock n’ roll!’_ , but the warlock is instead silent as electricity flares up around him, flying from his open palms and ripping through the horde of thrall before them.

It’s unnerving to see Luke without the gusto everyone knew him for, but Kel doesn’t have time to wallow in self-loathing at the fact he’d been the one to dampen it.

He and Cayde follow after Luke, single shots from their pair of hand cannons picking off whatever Hive escaped from the warlock’s raging storm. Kel turns around once to fire a shot at the Abyssal Knight still pursuing them, hoping to find _some_ weakness, but the bullet doesn’t so much as cause it to stumble.

Echo beeps at him to get his attention just as he turns away and he pauses, watching as though in slow motion as something incandescent wavers around the Knight’s gargantuan form; an image flashes in his mind of a dead titan in a Crucible arena.

The Knight’s body shifts as it moves to strike down and Kel dives out of the way, rolling back into gear and taking off after the other two.

They can see more of the Abyssal Knights ahead, clear of the screaming thrall that Luke had successfully reduced to smoking ash. Something glows brightly in the darkness of the Ascendant Plane right in the middle of the three monsters, and both Kel and Luke immediately recognize the opaque white shield unique to their teammate.

One of the knights rears back with its weapon and slams it down on the shield, scattering the sound of cracking glass on the wind around them. Quinn lets out a scream of helpless fear from within the shield’s dome.

“Cayde, we can kill these things, do you have a barrage ready?”

“Hold on, _what_?” Luke demands.

There’s no hesitation in Cayde’s answer. “I do.”

The easy, unflinching trust for him to give an affirmative without even knowing what his plan was, after everything he’d done and _nearly_ done, punches Kel in the chest. He sequesters that feeling for later, a weapon to use against Thorn when it tries to press into the depths of his mind for an advantage.

Nine bullets in Thorn’s magazine. Three Abyssal Knights.

He takes aim—three shots each, a full magazine of hungry, caustic bullets that do exactly as he had hoped they would. The three knights stumble when the rounds chew through whatever paracausal shields they had and shatter them, massive weapons slamming to the ground and making it rumble under their feet.

Cayde takes to the air with his light burning wild and unleashes a barrage of fiery knives that erupt violently over the carapace of the now defenseless goliaths, leaving them to howl as the fire of Cayde’s light rips them to shreds and turns them to ash that’s swept away by the wind.

Immediate threat to the one they came here to save out of the way, the three of them turn for the last Knight still lumbering heavily towards them. Kel reloads quickly and empties the full clip into it, his teammates hailing it with even more the moment its shields are destroyed.

Nothing but the roaring silence of the storm around them follows. It’s a reprieve and nothing more, Kel knows this even without the hissing laughter he hears cut through his thoughts.

Cayde doesn’t hesitate, immediately turning and bolting back for the center of the massive open platform they find themselves on. The opaque shield they’d seen, so similar and yet so different from a titan’s at the same time, dissipates and reveals Quinn lying prone on the crumbling stone within a small divot.

The knights had been hammering at her shield for longer than they’d been witness to, it seems.

He and Luke join Cayde.

“Hey, sunshine,” he’s saying as they approach, Ace gently set on the ground next to him as he reaches for her, “you’re alright. You’re alright.”

It seems more like he’s trying to convince himself rather than her, but Kel doesn’t mention it.

She’s pale as a sheet and there are dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes, that much more pronounced with how white she looks, and there’s a thin sheen of sweat visible over her skin even in the desaturated colors of the Plane.

Her chest heaves with exertion and she shakes with something he can’t tell between weariness or unfiltered relief that they’d found her; morbidly, Kel wonders whether Oryx would’ve become unstoppable if they’d gotten here too late, for he knew now that _that_ is why he wanted all of them here, deep in his realm.

**_Power feeds power._**  
**_Blade versus flesh._**  
**_Blade versus Eternity._**  
**_There can be no survival without teeth._**

Thorn’s laughter grows louder and Kel goes stiff as he fights with himself, suddenly struggling not to lift the barrel of the gun and fire off three _very_ specific shots.

Weight hits him and nearly throws him off balance, and Kel only realizes that someone’s embraced him when the contact somehow pushes the dark static from his mind and leaves his thoughts clear again. He blinks, looking down and seeing Quinn with her arms tight around his back and face pressed against his chestplate.

His throat feels tight; he wasn’t deserving of the silent _thank you_ she was projecting to him, not at all, but he hesitantly wraps an arm around her back in return.

“Can you move?” He asks her, following Cayde’s line of sight when he lifts Ace at the ready. Already the Taken were swarming again. They couldn’t stay here.

She looks like she might pass out at any moment, but when she steps back he spends a moment wondering at the sheer force of will the woman had to be able to keep upright after being trapped here for so long, after an ordeal that must have drained her to the brink.

She nods, pausing when Glyph materializes briefly to shift from Cayde to her.

“Good, that’s good, because there are a _lot_ of bad guys heading our way,” Luke says, already hop-stepping back in the direction they’d come.

“Kel, take point again. Quinn, stick close. Luke, you ‘n me bring up the rear. Move!” Cayde barks out quickly, and all of them—all _four_ of them—take off, hoping that their path would remain clear as they’d made it.

He didn’t hold out hope, knowing that now Oryx had them where he wanted them they weren’t going to leave easy. Part of him wants to argue Cayde’s order for Quinn to stick close to him with Thorn’s possessive, dark whispering growing disorientingly loud and demanding, but he doesn’t.

It was a double-edged sword, grasping at his mind greedily and testing every ounce of his carefully honed restraint, but the only weapon among them that could damage the powerful creatures that he hoped could only exist within this realm.

Instead, Kel took solace in knowing that Cayde still trusted him to maintain his control over something that could be both their and and salvation here.

Taken swarm at them from all sides as they run, the King of this world throwing oceans of screaming and howling thrall and knights and acolytes at them to slow them down and tire them out. To stop them from leaving.

Kel understands now why the disastrous mission that Gil died on went the way it had.

It’s nothing but sheer luck that sees the four of them back to the beginning, back to the passage they’d come through and out of the choking void.

They weren’t safe, far from it—if Gil’s death had told them anything, things were about to get even _more_ difficult.

The moment they’re out of the tight passage and into the cavernous halls and suspended platforms filled with rock and chitinous growths and writhing worms that made up the Dreadnaught, they stop for nothing, slowing only to push back against the waves and waves of enemies Oryx furiously throws at them.

By the time they make it back to the transmat zone and are pulled into the confines of Cayde’s ship all of them are exhausted—though, he imagines, nowhere near to the state Quinn likely is—and Sundance immediately sends the ship into flight away from Oryx and his throne and the Taken.

The ship makes it into hyperspace and it’s only then that all of them allow themselves to catch their breath and relax.

“How long was I gone?” Quinn asks quietly from where she’d collapsed against the hull of the ship, hands hanging limply on the ground on either side of her and legs bent unevenly where they stretch out in front of her.

“ _Almost two months_.” Sundance answers her from within the ship’s systems, her voice soothing and gentle.

There are tears in her eyes. “It felt like so much longer.” She whispers, and then the first sob wracks her body.

Cayde is at her side instantly, pulling her against him and settling his chin on top of her head, jaw lights flashing erratically while they’re caught somewhere between his choking relief and concern. “You’re alright now, sunshine.” He says, rocking her gently while she clutches at him and cries. “You’re alright. We’re taking you home.”

Kel looks away, unable to stop the feeling that he was an intruder to the scene and wordlessly moving for the rear of the ship. He doesn’t belong here with either of them, not while the corrupting grasp of the Darkness claws at him and tells him to just _end her suffering_.

Somewhere between there and Earth she falls asleep, too exhausted from her ordeal to remain awake, and she stays that way even when they arrive at the Tower and are transmatted down into the hangar. Cayde carries her all the way to the medical ward, Luke and Kel both following and remaining outside while they wait to hear how she is.

The silence between them is stifling.

It’s comfortable enough for Kel, but it leaves Luke twitching and fidgeting restlessly until he speaks up.

“I don’t think even Gil could’ve held up a ward against those things after a month of...all that.” He says, the statement seemingly more to himself than to anyone else, but Kel’s helmet tilts up to him just slightly and the warlock freezes as though only just remembering he was even there.

Kel stares at him for a length, Thorn clawing at his thoughts after hours of silence and telling him to get up, to reach out and strangle Luke for _daring_ to speak Gil’s name. Instead, he nods and evenly replies: “No, he couldn’t have.”

The look of shock on Luke’s face is absolutely worth the pain of acknowledging a still raw wound.

He won’t stay in the City. He can’t. Gil had been the only reason Kel had ever agreed to work as part of a team, the only reason he’d grown to enjoy someone always having his back while he was out in the wild.

He’d miss Quinn. He has to hope she wouldn’t lose the bright personality that had wiggled its way under his skin, and she was one of the few that acutely understood why he found solace in silence and solitude.

Deep down, he’ll miss Luke and his obnoxious, optimistic energy, too; he knows he can’t keep blaming the warlock forever, and it’s only the sharp sting of loss and Thorn’s desperate, hungry whispering that has him pointing the finger of blame in his direction.

Cayde, Ikora, Zavala, Banshee, he’d miss all of them. Shaxx, too, though he’s sure the feeling wasn’t going to be returned.

At least with Quinn back in the Vanguard’s hands, Kel could be satisfied in knowing Gil’s death wasn’t in vain.

Maybe once the wound has healed he’ll come back.

Maybe.

His thumb drags along the grip of Thorn, still hissing at the back of his skull, still urging him to rip open Luke and drink in the light he’ll bleed. It was furious at his careful restraint, frantic that it was being ignored by him ever since the debacle in the war room.

That had been the first time Kel had lost control of himself and snapped in hundreds of years since the phantoms from his first life had begun to plague him, and Kel swears to himself that it was going to be the last.

He speaks with Quinn once she’s awake again, quietly and evenly, just as she remembers.

Cayde stands nearby, unwilling to leave her side and relaying his messages and report to the other Vanguard members through Sundance. He doesn’t mention how close Kel had come to putting down the only other remaining member of their fireteam, nor does he watch Kel like a hawk as though expecting that buried rage to reappear, and Kel appreciates it more than he’ll ever be able to put into words.

She’ll find out, eventually. Luke has too big of a mouth for her not to, and once he vanishes from the Tower he knows she’ll wonder why.

When he leaves the ward and heads back through the Tower he figures it’s well enough that her last impression of him before he left for who knew how long is just the same as before the loss of his best friend ripped open old wounds and nearly changed him for the worse.

She needs the stability right now, and while that implies him needing to stay he knows he can’t. Cayde and Luke were fixed enough points on their own, and they could fill in where he’d never be able to so long as Thorn was at his side.

Eris Morn is out in the sunlight of the plaza for once and Kel stops in his path to stare at her.

She’s watching him expectantly.

“There’s no coming back.” It’s more of a statement than a question. He already knows the answer.

“Not fully.” She says, her head tilting slightly. The answer as well as her covered, glowing gaze are surprisingly lucid. “The corruption digs in, burrows into the fiber of your bones as tenaciously as we cling to this dead rock of a planet. You yet hold the weapon. It is still trying. It will continue. It will get worse.”

Worse, implying that killing another guardian and gunning for his own teammate after only a few weeks with the weapon wasn’t that bad. He supposes, compared to the pain and torment she’d suffered at the hands of the Hive, it wasn’t.

They had stolen her eyes and poured corruption into her veins.

She had stolen theirs in return, and used that corruption to exact retribution in spite of the Light now shirking her.

He nods in response; he can still feel it at the back of his mind, insistent and angry. Whatever evil the Hive had planted in the weapon, it didn’t like being ignored.

Kel glances into the distance, his eyes settling on the gargantuan form of the Traveler hovering over the Last City on Earth. “You said there was a way to sever its connection to the Hive magic controlling it. I haven’t found it yet.”

“Xyor. The moon. Slay her.” She offers him, and he looks over at her, both of them sharing a quiet moment of understanding. As he turns away what she says next causes him to stop in his tracks again. “Perhaps you will get to keep your _eyes_ when she is gone.”

Had she just made a _joke_?

He blinks at her, and her head simply tilts the other way. “You will also be free of the worm wearing a dead girl’s face.”

Anyone else might have jerked back in surprise, but Kel simply curls his hands into fists at his sides. “How—?”

It’s a stupid question; all three of her stolen eyes blink slowly at him.

“I’ll silence it.” He says after a pause, wondering for a moment at just how wrong he may have been about Eris. “And I’ll make sure it doesn’t dig its claws into anyone else.” He’s not sure yet if it’ll even be possible for him to maintain control of it. But he _will_.

Her lips twitch into a smile so slight and so brief that Kel might have missed it. “Conviction. Eriana would have liked you.” She says, and as she returns to the Vanguard hall she leaves him with one more piece of advice: “Do not let it consume your light, and you may become something even the Hive fear.”

He watches her leave, then looks up at the silent Traveler in the distance, taking in the sight of it for just one more time.

Echo chirps at him cheerfully, confidently, and Kel leaves the Tower and the City behind.


End file.
